Elon Musk says electricity is key constraint for AI development

Elon Musk says electricity is key constraint for AI development is profiled by BTW Media because published evidence links it to internet infrastructure, governance, operational dependencies, or market visibility.

• Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and founder of xAI, in an interview with Norway wealth fund CEO Nicolai Tangen, said electricity would be a key future constraint for AI development.
• He added that a lack of advanced chips was hampering the training of AI chatbot Grok version 2 model and the next version was expected to be trained by May.
• Musk predicted development of artificial intelligence that was smarter than the smartest human probably by next year, or by 2026.

Elon Musk predicted in an interview on April 8 that while a shortage of chips were a big constraint for the development of AI so far, electricity supply will be crucial in the near future.

The tycoon Musk took an interview by Norway wealth fund CEO Nicolai Tangen on X spaces on this Monday and revealed that the next version of AI chatbot Grok from his xAI startup, was expected to be trained by May.

Also read: Musk’s xAI to launch an improved version of the chatbot Grok

Also read: Elon Musk sues OpenAI over alleged mission drift towards profit

Chips are the main factor for current AI

Musk started xAI last year as a challenger to OpenAI and released Grok, its first AI macro-model product.

On March 28, xAI announced Grok-1.5, the latest model capable of long context understanding and advanced reasoning, which will be available to early testers and existing Grok users on the X platform soon.

Musk said the training of the Grok version 2 model requires about 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and the version beyond that, like Grok 3, model will require 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips.

Electricity is the driver of future artificial general intelligence (AGI)

While the training of Grok’s version 2 model was hampered by the lack of advanced chips, the Tesla CEO believed that the availability of electricity will be crucial to AI development in the next year or two.

And he predicted that “If you define AGI as smarter than the smartest human, I think it’s probably next year, within two years.”

When talked about electric-vehicles (EV) industry, Musk sees Swedish union strike against Tesla petering out but poses Chinese EV companies as “the most competitive in the world” and “the most toughest competitive challenges”.